Building for the Arts

Over the past two decades, the arts in America have experienced an unprecedented building boom, with more than sixteen billion dollars directed to museums, theaters, symphony halls, opera houses, and centers for the visual and performing arts. Among the projects that emerged from the boom were many brilliant successes. Others, like the addition of the Quadracci Pavilion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, brought international renown but also tens of millions of dollars of off-budget debt while offering scarce additional benefit to the arts-and embodying the cultural sector's worst fears that the arts were being displaced by the big, status-driven architecture projects built to contain them. With Building for the Arts, Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo explore how artistic vision, funding partnerships, and institutional culture work together - or fail to - throughout the process of major cultural construction projects.Drawing on case studies and in-depth interviews at museums and other cultural institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Atlanta Opera, and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, they analyze the decision-making challenges and identify four factors whose alignment characterizes the most successful of the projects discussed: institutional requirements, capacity of the institution to manage the project while maintaining ongoing operations, community support, and sufficient funding. How and whether these factors are strategically aligned, the authors argue, can lead an organization to either thrive or fail. Grounded in the latest scholarship on nonprofit strategy and governance, Building for the Arts will be an invaluable resource for arts staff and management, trustees of arts organizations, development professionals, and donors, as well as those who study and seek to understand them.

"Are large-scale building projects good for the arts? And why do so many go so horribly wrong? Frumkin and Kolendo bring to life the processes by which decisions get made with compelling interviews and a colorful cast of characters, revealing a tangled web of internal politics, personal ambitions, miscalculations, community conflict, and public relations flascos. Throughout, they provide thoughtful analysis to help planners and project directors think about how to approach decisions along the way. Their book should be essential for arts and public administration programs." (Steven J. Tepper, Vanderbilt University)"

Peter Frumkin is professor of social policy and faculty director of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Strategic Giving and The Essence of Strategic Giving, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. Ana Kolendo is a research fellow at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania.